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John doesn't visit the art shop every day. Thora has rules: when he shows up he has to be sober, and if he doesn't pass her sniff test, he gets sent to the back room to clean up. There's a washer/dryer in the storage area, plus a concrete stall with a plastic curtain, spattered with paint streaks in every imaginable color.
The amount of time John can stand to be sober for varies, as does his willingness to put on a respectable face for Thora's customers. If he could go through the motions, he wouldn't be a bum in the first place. But he enjoys spending the occasional afternoon on the wood crate next to the counter, dozing like an old dog in a patch of sun on the floor of a general store. Occasional small comforts keep John on the path to the slow death he's chosen for himself.
One morning, John arrives at Art Condition and sees a new security camera mounted in the awning. He used similar tech in the field, not that it means anything. The presence of the camera is a coincidence. No one is looking for him here.
All the same, John gives the shop a wide berth for awhile. His days are numbered, but he's not dying in a black hood if he can help it.
*
A few days later, John wakes up to the sound of a woman's voice saying his name.
His eyes open to slits. His head is pounding. Through gummy lashes he sees red hair, and a big smile. The greasy paper bag she's clutching smells like food.
“You're John, right?" The woman's voice is faintly accented. She sounds nervous. “Sorry, I don't mean to bother you. Thora asked me to keep an eye out for you while she's on vacation. My name's Grace, I'm looking after Art Condition for a couple of weeks.”
John sits up the rest of the way with an effort. "Nice to meet you," he rasps. He doesn't offer to shake her small, clean hand.
"Oh, you were asleep!" She presses a hand to her chest. "I'm sorry. I just came to see if you'd like a sandwich."
"Thora's place does sandwiches now?"
Grace laughs. It's a nice laugh, a little too nasal to be chic. "I have this hot plate." She gestures with the bag. John tries not to follow it with his eyes like a starving dog. "I made sandwiches for me and the girls who run the life drawing class upstairs. Afterwards, I had all this butter and cheese left and nowhere to put it, so I made some more sandwiches for the women who work at the laundromat next door. After that there was enough left for one more sandwich, so I thought…"
She shrugs, visibly embarrassed. John wants to tell her she's got nothing to be embarrassed about. He just wishes she'd hand the food over before his stomach growls loud enough for both of them to hear.
"Anyway, there's a grilled cheese sandwich in here, if you want it. And a pickle. And a bag of chips, and a Coke. And a cookie. I won't be offended if you're not hungry, I shouldn't have assumed..."
“Actually,” John croaks. "I haven't had my breakfast yet."
Beaming, Grace gives him the bag. "If you need anything, come by the shop," she says. "I'll be there till the end of the month, and then Thora should be back."
John thanks her again, and watches as she rounds the corner. A nice lady, he thinks. Basically what he'd expect from a friend of Thora's. She should probably be more careful, giving handouts to bums in blind alleys. Better to stay where that fancy new security system can keep an eye on her.
*
John caught a whiff of zealotry coming off Grace that makes him think he'd be better off keeping his distance from Art Condition until Thora returns. John doesn't want to be some nice lady's project. He doesn't have the kinds of problems that a stranger's generosity can fix. Money, or lack of it, isn't how he got here. He's homeless because it doesn't make any difference whether he dies on the street or in a by-the-hour room with a busted TV. Jessica hadn’t died comfortably. Why should he?
It was winter when John made his way back to the States after Ordos. Spring had arrived while he was in Mexico making arrangements for Peter Arndt's confinement, but it was still plenty cold when he came back to New York. There are lots of places John would rather have gone than the city. There's no other place he could keep hidden with so little effort. Even here he's superstitious about cameras.
Avoiding the shop means he spends more time in the warehouse camp in Brooklyn where he slept during the worst of the cold weather. He hasn't been there much since it warmed up, but he visits sometimes, mostly for Joan. He picks a few pockets on his way there and gives her the cash. She smiles like she's glad to see him and that makes it worth the effort.
Later in the week, faced with a dwindling supply of clean socks, John swings back by Art Condition to judge the lay of the land. There's some commotion surrounding a food cart parked on the sidewalk outside the shop. It's a nice day; John is shivering, but most of the people in line for tacos are in shirt sleeves. Raised voices, one of them a woman's, draw him closer.
"You're scaring my customers away!" A red-face balding man is bellowing at someone John can't see. "These people come from all over because you feed them, they stand around on the sidewalk, my customers stay away. I lose money."
"How many customers do you normally see in one morning, Mr. Mazurka?" The woman's voice, high and strident, is familiar to John.
"I don't know! I am not the census!"
"Give me a number, and I'll write you a check. Until then, could you maybe back off and let people enjoy their food?"
John shoulders his way forward. Half the crowd is watching with bated breath to see whether Mr. Mazurka's outrage will win out over his desire not to jeopardize the compensation Grace is dangling in front of him.
Behind John, a small but sizeable crowd is still lined up at the food cart. Two people in their early twenties are handing out water bottles and cartons of tacos as fast as they can.
A weatherbeaten woman catches his eye. “Food’s free,” she tells him, in the confiding tone of an insider sharing valuable information. “Lady paid for the cart to stay all day.”
John wonders what the eyes on the other side of the fancy camera made of that. Crowds are an inherent security risk.
"Nice lady," he murmurs.
The woman shrugs. The city is filled with rich people who give things away in bursts. You might as well buy a Powerball ticket as depend on the charity of moneyed New Yorkers.
A guy in a suit peels away from the food cart, clutching tacos in one hand and his phone in the other. John lets him take a few steps, then taps him on the shoulder and yanks the food out of his hand. He gapes at John, outraged.
"They're free, so you can get another one," John suggests, in a soft, menacing voice. "This time, don't forget to tip."
Eyes bore into his back as he walks away. John's cheerful for the rest of the afternoon.
*
John sees Grace painting in the park early the next morning. It's sheer coincidence. He's never slept on the promenade before, and it's not especially close to Art Condition.
Grace sits at an easel near the railing, gazing out at a loud sunrise, yellow and pink and blue and purple all smeared together over the surface of the water. Seems like the kind of thing an artist would get up early to paint. John wishes he could see her face. Her hair is very red against her dark blue shawl.
When he's cleared her line of sight and there's no chance of being seen, he looks back at Grace over his shoulder. From this angle he can see that the canvas propped up on her easel is blank, and the hand she's using to hold the brush is curled up on her knee, motionless.
Whatever Grace sees when she sits and gazes out over the relentless churn of deep water, it isn't inspiring art at the moment.
*
"John! It's good to see you again." Grace's face lights up like a beacon, good cheer taking a slight turn for the manic. "I was afraid I ran you off."
"I don't scare that easy."
"Want a donut? Please say yes, otherwise I'll eat the whole thing." She shoves a white cardboard box at him, containing not just donuts but croissants, danishes, and bagels.
He'd thought about it, and decided that the suits hanging around the food truck weren't there for him. It was obvious that all they saw when they looked at John was the bum. He think that they, and the camera, are here for Grace. Seems like a lot of trouble to go to just to keep an eye on an eccentric do-gooder with a little money to burn.
John eyes a poppyseed bagel, and Grace slathers cream cheese on it, sliding it over the counter to him on a napkin.
"Ever since you helped Thora out with the boxes, I've seen you around here at least once a week," she says, chatty, casual. "Did you get set up somewhere?"
John's poker face is pretty good but he's glad he has a beard to hide behind. As far as he can remember, the first day he saw Grace was the day she gave him the sandwich. He wonders yet again if he should be suspicious of this little woman with her neat edges and slightly too-bright smile.
"I've been around," he says vaguely. "I didn't want to presume."
She frowns. "You're not. If you want to get cleaned up, you can help yourself. No one's using the back room right now."
John keeps his mouth shut, and goes into the back. The door locks from the shop side, not the inside. He's never thought about it before. He thinks that if Grace tries to keep him here, he might just relax and let her.
Improvements have been made to the shower and laundry area. It's still a small, drab concrete room, but there's a new table piled high with clean, fluffy towels. Inside the shower, there's a basket hanging from the shower nozzle stocked with a full array of hygiene and toiletry products all bearing the label of a high-end menswear brand. Everything someone might need to transform themself back into a human being is in arm's reach. Almost on a whim, John sets to work with razor, nail clippers, and scissors.
Thirty minutes later John looks in the mirror and sees a face he recognizes. Other people will recognize it too. Maybe he didn't think this through. Or maybe some part of him is tired of running.
John thinks about Grace as he loads his stuff into the washing machine. She's been part of the ecosystem at Art Condition for awhile, meaning she predated the fancy security system. He'd assumed it was the other way around. He wonders if maybe that sleek little camera was purchased by the same guy who'd owned the engraved nail clippers and the comb set and the hundred dollar aftershave.
He drifts back to the front room, where Grace is helping a customer choose between papers of different weights. The wood crate is still in its place against the wall. He sinks down, feeling the heaviness of his bones, the dull ache of abused joints and muscles. The exhaustion is like a sedative and now that he's sitting down, it's pleasant. There's food in his stomach. Every time he moves, clean clothes rub against clean skin. There's a kind of euphoria he associates with the aftermath of a grueling physical campaign, when he wakes up after his first full night of sleep and feels his whole body sing in relief. It's the first purely physical pleasure he's experienced since he found out about Jessica.
"Find everything you needed?" Grace asks him, when the customer leaves.
John opens his eyes to find her leaning against the counter, smiling down at him. "I'm good, thanks. Is it okay if I wait for my stuff to come out of the dryer?"
"Yes, of course. You can hang out there, or catch a nap in the back, up to you."
John thanks her. Grace sits down to read a book. After a couple of seconds, when John's looking at the world through his eyelashes, she sneaks a second glance at him. John pretends not to notice. He didn't spend all that time getting cleaned up just to balk when a pretty lady looks at him twice.
He doesn't mean to fall asleep. Rest sneaks up on him, lulls him into relaxing muscle by muscle, breath by breath.
Sleep, John vaguely remembers, used to feel like nothing but a sweet heaviness tugging him down into the dark. These days, he dreams so hard that sleep is almost as tiring as being awake. He exhausts himself dreaming, running from shadows, fighting enemies without names or faces.
He doesn't even realize he's drifted off until he jolts awake and finds himself on the floor. Someone's been saying his name, he thinks. Then his vision clears and he sees Grace hovering over him. When he blinks, she backs off.
"You were dreaming," says Grace, squeezing his shoulder. Her hand is very warm through his thin t-shirt. "You're okay now. Take a moment."
John waits until he's sure his legs will hold him before he tries to get up. He feels sore and brittle, like napping aged him ten years. It's too warm in the shop suddenly, smothering.
When he finally picks himself up off the floor, Grace isn't in the room. He tries to remember how he fell. Lashing out in his sleep, maybe. Good thing Grace didn't get too close. Unless she did, and that's why she darted out of the room while he was still getting his bearings. Maybe he hurt her. Maybe she hid the evidence because she didn't want him to feel bad.
John has his pack on his shoulder and is halfway to the door before Grace comes back.
"You're leaving?" She's holding a large mug of coffee. She sounds hurt. "Your clothes are still in the dryer."
John's been a lost cause since long before they met. He wishes he could explain that to her in a few simple words, so she won't feel bad, or worry about him. But he's frozen, words becoming a knot in his aching throat.
He flees, finally a coward after all these years.
*
Days pass in a smear of rain and rye whiskey. It's the same old story: when he's drunk he doesn't care, and when he's sober the inside of his head becomes hostile territory, his only escape at the bottom of the bottle. Even so, by the weekend he's compelled to admit that he needs clean socks and a blanket to sleep under. It's funny what you can and can't live without.
Late Saturday night finds John kneeling at the back door of Art Condition, picking the lock in the darkness and hoping that Grace didn't just throw all his stuff in the dumpster. He doesn't plan to be here for long, so he flips the light switch without a second thought.
As he blinks against the brightness, someone screams and hits him hard with a giant umbrella.
John yelps and puts his hands up to protect his face. He tries to back out of weapons range. "I just came to get my clothes!" he cries, as Grace brings the umbrella down on his ear.
There's a moment of strained silence."John?" says Grace, voice high and bewildered.
"I'm sorry," he says again, still in a defensive crouch. "I didn't think anyone would be here at this hour."
When a few seconds pass and she doesn't say anything (or hit him again), John lowers his hands to squint at her. Grace is pale, her expression disbelieving. She's wearing a man’s white undershirt that hangs just above her bare knees.
Behind her is an air mattress topped with a rumpled pillow and blanket.
"I ought to hit you again just for scaring me like that." She wields the umbrella with two hands, like a sword. "What the hell were you doing?"
"Picking the lock," John says, helpfully.
"You couldn't wait eight hours and come in by the front door?"
She says it like she can't imagine why anyone would find it easier to pick a lock than look a decent person in the eye and ask for what they need. John stares at his feet.
"Good grief." Grace blinks down at the umbrella like she's surprised she's still holding it. "Okay, fine. Stay there and don't make any sudden moves. I'll get your damn clothes."
She crosses the room and walks around the end of a long table piled high with various heaps of unfolded laundry in labeled cardboard boxes. As she picks through the debris, John's eyes sweep the room, looking for something to explain why Grace is sleeping on an air mattress in a dusty storage room, instead of going home to the lemon verbena scented bed she shares with the security-conscious guy who likes expensive shaving kits.
It's none of his business. John's not getting involved. He's just curious.
"Here." There's a muffled thump. John looks down at his feet, where Grace has dumped a cardboard box. All his laundry is in it. Folded, he thinks at first, but then he realizes that every ragged t-shirt and holey pair of socks has been rolled up. Like he's a kid going away to summer camp, and she didn't want his clothes to wrinkle in a duffle bag.
John swallows.
"I put some extra stuff in there. If there's anything you don't need or want, please pass it on to someone who does." She crosses her arms, rubs them like she has goosebumps. "If you need anything else, you come back after eight ay-em, got it?"
It's a clear dismissal. He would go now and never come back, if she didn't look more embarrassed and unhappy than angry. The most dangerous thing about Grace is that she makes John curious.
"Is everything okay?" he says softly.
"Yes, I'm fine." Her voice cracks.
Hesitant, John reaches out and puts his hand on the box, sitting on the table between them. It's a way to reach for her without betraying himself. He doesn't want Grace to be upset or angry the last time he ever sees her.
"I'm sorry, again. I didn't mean to scare you."
"No, I know. You were hoping to get out of seeing me at all." Grace reaches for a random piece of clothing from the pile at the end of the table and starts folding it. "Am I really that annoying?"
John blinks. He can't tell if she's actually asking or if she's making some kind of point.
"I don't deserve your kindness," he says, as bluntly as he can. "I'm not a good person. You shouldn't care what I think."
Grace snorts. “All right, John. Whatever you say."
He chews the inside of his mouth. She's not annoying. She's small and warm and bright, like a votive candle flickering in the dark. He looks away, grasping for anything to say that isn't useless.
"If you're sleeping here regularly, you should get better locks on the doors," he tells her.
"I'm not sleeping here," says Grace, too quickly. "I have a house. I was just working late."
John looks up at her from under his eyebrows.
"Fine," she grumbles. "I sleep here sometimes. No one but you has ever tried to break in!"
He should go. He should already be gone. Why is he dragging his feet? "Just mention it to the guy who put the camera up. If he's doing security here, he should do it right."
"What camera?" she frowns.
John's stomach plummets to his feet.
As the protegee of a silent benefactor with a long reach and a deep pocket, Grace had made sense to him. It's easy to imagine someone loving her, taking extraordinary measures to protect her. But if she doesn't know about the eyes that are watching her, then the situation isn't what John thought.
He's out of practice at interrogations. In his old job, before he questioned a mark he learned who they were inside and out. He knows nothing about Grace except that she is kind, and lonely.
But there's the shirt she sleeps in, the high-end soap and shaving kit, the money she seems to spend in liberal amounts on everyone but herself. The quiet sadness in her eyes. It paints a picture.
"I lost someone too," he says. He doesn't know that he's going to say it until the words are already out of his mouth. Two months have passed since John found out about Jessica, and this is the first time he's spoken about her to another person. "I know what it's like. Sleeping in the places you used to be together...it's like trying to sleep on a bed of nails. Just try not to take risks. If they loved you, they'd want you to be safe."
Grace turns grey. Suddenly she puts down the shirt she's folding and turns her back. For a long awful second John wishes he'd jumped the railing into the river instead of coming back for his damn socks.
"What was their name?" she says.
It's John's turn to be silent. He tries, but no matter how hard he tries to pry Jessica's name off the tip of his tongue, he can't do it. Not even for this. Something stings the corner of his eye.
"John."
When he looks up, Grace is looking at him, soft and weary but present in her own face. The mask of good cheer is nowhere to be seen.
"I can't think without my pants on," she says. "Will you please go into the other room and start a pot of coffee? Everything is right there, there's water and milk in the mini fridge."
It’s an invitation, one he doesn’t have to accept.
John thinks, when he flicks the lights on and shuts the storage room door, that he should just keep walking out through the front door. Instead, he makes the coffee like she asked. He finds the hot plate she uses to make sandwiches and thinks about the moment he opened his eyes behind a dumpster and found Grace hovering over him. He'd been hungrier than he knew for her kind of warmth.
When Grace rejoins him, she makes a beeline for the coffee pot. John suspects her of purposely not coming out until she could smell that it was ready.
He steps out from behind the counter and lets her take his place, watches her open cabinets and pull out a pair of clean mugs. She asks him how he takes his coffee. She's already set out cream and sugar, so John says cream and sugar.
"It's not that I don't want to be reminded of Harold," she says, managing to sound almost casual, apart from the ferocious way she stirs her coffee. "It's more that I'm the only one who remembers him. He didn't have anyone. No family, no friends. Not even colleagues he was close with. I was the only person who came to his memorial. Sometimes I feel like I made him up. I mean, there wasn't even a body to bury."
John sits up a little straighter, a prickling at the back of his mind.
"But we lived together. I still have all the things he left behind, the art we chose together. I'm grateful that I can look at that stuff and say, here's something Harold touched, or that picture's crooked because Harold insisted on hanging it himself even though we didn't have a level."
Grace trails off, looking at her hands. "But also, I don't want to live in a museum. Sometimes I just want to fall asleep playing a dumb game on my phone, not thinking sad thoughts about how the sheets don't smell like him anymore."
"When did you lose him?" he asks gently.
"Six months ago. The ferry bombing, last September."
The prickling at the back of John's head gives way to certainty. Grace's Harold sounds less like a person to him and more like a textbook deep cover identity. The manner of death just confirms it. Real men leave corpses when they die.
Grace wraps her hands around her mug and stares down at the counter. "Harold left me a lot of money in his will. My parents were—I mean they tried not to show it, but I could tell that they thought I was better off with the money and without a fiance. But I have a hard time spending any of it. I almost feel like someone's trying to buy me off. Like it's the universe saying, oh, you lost Harold, but cheer up! At least you can buy things! So I go weeks, months at a time ignoring it. Then I do something nuts, like hire a food cart for a whole day. I honestly don't know if losing him changed me, or if I was always this lonely and scatterbrained and Harold just...made me better for awhile."
John looks down into his coffee, then catches his own reflection and looks away.
A year ago he could have found out who installed the camera over the door of the shop. He could have tracked them down and found out what they wanted from Grace. Now all he's got are rusty instincts and blunt reflexes.
He's pretty sure that this guy Harold stole a bunch of money, then left it to Grace for safekeeping when he had to bail. Maybe he installed the camera. Maybe he plans to come back for the money when he doesn't need to be dead anymore, and wants to keep an eye on his assets in the mean time. But John can't prove that. He can't even really describe his old job in enough detail to convince Grace that he knows a conman when he sees one. All he could do is make Grace doubt that Harold had loved her, and there's no point. If someone told John tomorrow that Jessica had lied to him, it wouldn't make her death any less the end of his world.
Suddenly, there's a loud knock on the door. The incredulity in Grace's expression would be comical under different circumstances. She stands up; John stands with her.
"Wait," he says, hand on her arm. She goes still. She's small and warm to touch. John tries not to notice.
He takes up position in the blind corner near the door. Grace follows him with her eyes, but she doesn't ask questions. When he nods, she opens the door a crack. "Can I help you?" she says, with just the right amount of haughty annoyance.
"Universal Security Solutions," says the man on the other side. No accent, neutral tone of voice. "We had a report of a disturbance at this address. Can I ask, are you here alone?"
Grace gives a bemused little laugh. "Report from who?" she says. "I don't have security."
He ignores this. "We have reason to believe that someone entered the property just now. White male, beard, about six-three. See anyone like that?"
"I'm not saying I did, but I don't see what business it is of yours."
There's a pause. John feels a brief pang of amused sympathy as the guy at the door struggles to overcome Grace's resistance. "The man we're looking for is presumed to be armed and extremely dangerous," he says finally. "Mind if I step inside and take a look?"
"I'm afraid I do mind," says Grace pleasantly. "You need to leave."
There's a thud, and a jangle of the bell over the door. John peers around the corner just in time to see Grace trying to shut the door on the man's foot. When that doesn't work, she stomps his toes with her heel. The man yelps.
"Ma'am, I'm here for your safety, could you just—"
"I don't believe that for one minute," Grace shoots back. "What's your name, huh? Who do you work for?"
John thinks he could let Grace handle this on her own, but he has a theory he wants to test. He steps out of his corner and stands behind Grace, where the guy can get a good look at him.
"I'm not armed or dangerous," he says. "But if you don't do what she says, the second part's gonna change."
The guy looks John in the face for long enough that John worries he made the wrong call. A fight could go either way, with John in his current condition. Then the guy relaxes, hands falling to his sides. John doesn't see an earpiece, but he must have one, because he's a caricature of hired muscle who just got new orders mid-engagement.
"Apologies for the disturbance," he says stiffly. He glances one last time from John to Grace and back again, maybe gauging whether Grace is going to throw something when he turns his back.
John and Grace trade looks as he walks away. John gives it a few seconds, then goes to the door and sticks his head out into the cool nighttime air. He sees the guy in the suit climb into a car parked a little ways down the street.
"What in the world was all that about?" says Grace, behind him.
John wonders the same thing. Acting on a hunch, he steps outside and yanks the camera out of the awning, turning it over in his hands. Universal Security Solutions is etched along the side. He smiles. Nothing says "fake security company" like a camera that goes out of its way to tell people who put it there.
He shows it to Grace, who starts to touch it, then pulls her hand back.
John wonders if he misjudged Grace's fiance. Maybe he really did love her. Maybe he's not safeguarding his money, but watching Grace from a distance, the way John had watched Jessica over the years.
Grace shakes her head as if to clear it. "If Thora comes back from vacation and finds out I let some weirdo stalker put a bunch of cameras up in her store, she is not going to be happy," she says as she locks and bolts the front door and draws the blinds down over the windows.
"I think the shop is safe," says John lightly. "But the locks definitely need an upgrade."
"I heard you the first time. I'll call someone in the morning." Grace smiles. "I'll tell them I need a lock even my friend John can't pick. You'll have to come back some time and test it."
It's a nice thought. John lets himself imagine it for a moment. "Maybe I'll start a business," he says, to make her laugh.
It works, but the laugh turns into a yawn. Grace looks down at her coffee in dismay. Just like that the spell breaks, and John feels the tendrils of the dark city outside her door reaching for him again.
"I should get going," he says. "Let you get your rest."
"Yeah, okay. Do you have your bag?"
John goes into the back to get the bag Grace had packed for him. He'll think of her every time he unrolls a clean shirt. He'll think of her when he drinks coffee and has bad dreams and does his laundry.
Grace looks through the minifridge, spreads some food out on the counter, and starts assembling sandwiches, which go into ziploc bags, then into a paper sack.
"Look, this is probably overstepping, but I just want to say one thing." Grace doesn't look at him, keeping her eyes fixed on the peanut butter jar. "I've met a lot of people who don't have anywhere to go. A lot of them ended up that way because they didn't have any options. But I don't think that's you. I think you're here because something awful happened, and it made you feel like there wasn't a place for you in the world anymore."
John doesn't say anything, but she doesn't seem to need a reply.
"But that'll change one day, I hope. And I think you belong here. So when you're ready, come and find me, and I'll help you get on your feet."
Grace throws the last sandwich into the paper bag, rolls the top down. She holds it out for him to take, and John, blinking against double vision, reaches for it. He wishes he could promise to do as she's asking. He wishes he could give her something in exchange for what she's given him.
"It's all right," she says, smiling. "Front door's locked. You can go out through the back."
*
The world outside is quiet, the sidewalks and street deserted. John walks away from Art Condition, past the laundromat and the used book store and the Chinese bakery.
He's walked about a quarter-mile when a car parked on the curb flashes its headlights. The door opens, and man steps out. John doesn’t tense. He was expecting something like this.
"Hello, John," the man says. "Please don't be alarmed. I'd like to speak with you, if you could spare a moment."
Carefully, John moves so the headlights are no longer blinding him. This isn't the guy who tried to force his way through the door. This one is shorter, better dressed. French cuffs peek out from the sleeves of his jacket. He's wearing glasses and a hat, and leaning on a cane.
Something prickles at the back of John's head.
"Is your name Harold, by any chance?" he says, in his softest voice.
The man flinches like John threatened to hit him. John nearly grins. He's not sure how he knew; he just looks like someone who fits with Grace.
John digs into his pocket, finding the pieces of the camera he removed. He holds it out, and Harold snatches it, visibly alarmed.
"I get why you're watching her," John says. "But it won't work. You can't protect her that way. Trust me."
"I'm not here to discuss Grace with you." Harold's voice is sharp with barely concealed panicked. "I'd like to offer you a job."
"You know who I am?"
"Indeed I do, Mr. Reese."
Any other time the sound of that name would have sent John into his own kind of panic. Now, John feels strange, light and giddy. Almost hopeful. He grins, and watches Harold's eyes widen.
"Grace thinks you're dead," John says. "That's not okay."
Harold draws himself up, chest puffing out like a pigeon's, but John cuts him off. Every excuse he could offer is one that John's made to himself at one time or another, rational and logical and ultimately self-serving.
"I'll make you a deal," he says, feeling his own pulse speed up. "Go talk to Grace. I'll come visit in a week or so. If she tells me what I want to hear, you and I can discuss your job proposal." John hefts his bag on his shoulder. "And Harold? I'll be back to see her whether you tell her or not."
Without another word, John brushes past him and makes his way silently down the sidewalk. He strains through the sounds of the night until he hears Harold's footsteps, starting in the opposite direction.